Downtown

by Pete Hamill

  With the exception of Lower Fifth Avenue and Gramercy Park, the brownstoners were soon in full retreat. Grander, more imposing mansions were offering better, presumably safer lives as far north as Forty-second Street and Fifth. All you needed was a good sale of the old house and a bit more to buy and furnish the new one. The old families, with their useless children and their aversion to trade, sniffed at the possessors of “new” money, all those railroad people and oil people and steel people. Why, there were even Irishmen possessed of fortunes! And it seemed for a while in the 1870s and 1880s that the robber barons, as the press would label them, were arriving in New York every month, almost all of them passing through Pittsburgh on the way to Upper Fifth Avenue. The Gilded Age had begun. Old New York sniffed. The new people, to Knickerbocker noses, smelled crude, ill-mannered, ignorant about the refinements of life. They showed far too much, uh, energy. They bought art by the crate. They failed to distinguish between forks at dinner. They preferred fat slabs of beef and mashed potatoes to the intricate delicacies of Delmonico’s.

  But the old Knickerbockers could count. Their own fortunes were dwindling. They had given their faith to the monotheistic god of property, and that god was now failing them. They would buy houses of summer refuge in Saratoga or Newport, if only they could afford them. Why should some robber baron peddle his homely daughter to an impoverished English duke? There were, after all, many beautiful young Knickerbocker women who could begin the process of civilizing these rich new American men. Slowly, an exchange was made. The Knickerbockers began to merge with the new money, exchanging bloodlines and manners for a share of the new wealth. Their own names were often lost in the process.

  And yet something of Old New York survived among those dispossessed downtown people. It was impossible simply to move away from the old houses, built with such certainty, and forget them forever. Husbands had died in those houses, and wives, and, alas, too many children, and those dead lived vividly in memory. The books and furniture and paintings were packed into the moving vans, and the pilgrimage resumed to the north, but in memory, the discarded houses still glittered with life. It was no surprise that as the years passed, more and more women (and a few men) sought contact with the past through mediums and clairvoyants. They wanted to speak again to the dead, to hear one final admission of love or happiness, and various charlatans were glad to provide the voices. Literature, high and low, memoirs, and some journals underline their permanent sense of regret. Regret for the thing unsaid. Regret for the cruel remark that was said. In some ways, that emotion was the only permanence they ever attained.

  Along the Rialto of Fourteenth Street, an aching nostalgia always had its place too. The scholar Jon W. Finson reminds us that much of popular song in those days was about death. So many men had died in the Civil War. So many men, women, and children had died of tuberculosis or cholera or smallpox. Such songs can be dismissed too easily today, in our age of glib ironies, but in nineteenth-century New York, they helped thousands of people to express deep emotions. There were many songs directed at the Irish immigrant market, too many of them calculated Tin Pan Alley rubbish in the “Mother Machree” vein. But even the junk had power, a kind of acknowledgment that from the 1840s to the Gilded Age, Irish women had held families together against terrible odds. A few songs combined immigrant nostalgia for the Old Country with the finality of an American death. One example was “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen,” written in 1876 by an Indiana schoolteacher named Thomas P. Westendorf. It was swiftly embraced by many of the Irish of the day. The song is clearly a man’s address to a dying wife. It makes no direct reference to Ireland, or the wasted Irish countryside that a million of them had left behind in the 1840s. But the name of the wife was all the Irish needed to embrace it:

  I’ll take you home again, Kathleen,

  Across the ocean wild and wide,

  To where your heart has ever been,

  Since first you were my bonny bride.

  My father was the singer in our family, but my mother had her own songs, and this was one of them. I can hear her singing it in her light contralto voice in the immigrant parlors of Brooklyn before television, that lost time and place, as my sister Kathleen toddled among the guests. Anne Devlin Hamill, of 32 Madrid Street, the Short Strand, Belfast, Northern Ireland, was still singing it in the 1960s, when we, her American children, asked her to sing. I suspect she also heard it sung by others down near the old Rialto. As noted, she met my father at an Irish dance in the early 1930s at Webster Hall, three blocks below Fourteenth Street. The lyrics of the song went on: “The roses all have left your cheek, / I’ve watched them fade away and die . . .” The roses left my mother’s cheeks, of course, and my father’s, and they are buried beside each other in Staten Island. They died as they had lived most of their lives, as Americans. But as was true of so many other American millions, the Old Country never completely left them. On some nights now, I pass Webster Hall, at 125 East Eleventh Street, loud with hip-hop and DJs and crowds of the young. I hope that at least a few frantic young New Yorkers will find one another in the way my parents did. Someday, if they have long lives, they might even ache for the simplicities of Webster Hall.

  On Fourteenth Street in its heyday, nostalgia was not the only expression of the new city. Many other emotions were expressed on those stages too, provoking astonishment and laughter. The man who put most of them together was a New Yorker named Tony Pastor, who had been born Antonio Pastore, the son of Italian immigrants. He did his first turn as a singer when he was six, at a temperance meeting. In 1846, at age twelve, he started his career as a clown at P. T. Barnum’s Museum, moved in and out of blackface minstrelsy, and soon became a regular at the “free-and-easies” on the Bowery. But Tony Pastor had wider ambitions. He ran several of his own concert saloons, trying hard, with limited success, to keep the acts decent in order to attract respectable women. By his midforties, he was possessed of a brilliant idea: What if you could take the vitality of Bowery culture and cleanse it of its most vulgar surfaces? What if you completely transformed entertainment for blue-collar males into entertainment for the entire family? And what if this form of entertainment could find its place on the Rialto?

  In 1881, Pastor rented the theater in Tammany Hall, right next to the Academy of Music, and put his concept on stage. The format was familiar: the variety show that by 1875 had grown out of minstrelsy. Pastor enriched the format with the best available talent, including the brashest, most clever young performers. There were sad singers and comic singers, comedians, jugglers, and dancers, all moving at a slam-bang pace, with a lively orchestra backing them up from the pit. Among the dancers were young men who had learned from other men who had learned from dancers who once saw Master Juba. In the house itself, Pastor established strict rules. No cursing. No double entendre jokes. No politics. No drinking. No cigars. Just fun. For the whole family. The place was a roaring success. Middle-class women came to the shows, and so did orphaned newsboys and Tammany politicians and the remnants of the brownstoners. The format was soon named vaudeville.

  Until the triumph of motion pictures around 1920, vaudeville was the dominant form of American entertainment, with the performers traveling on “circuits” all over the country. In New York, Tony Pastor was king. The Academy of Music had sealed its own doom as a venue for opera when it refused to sell boxes to the new men of wealth; they responded by building the Metropolitan Opera House on Broadway and Thirty-ninth. Its first season was 1883. Three years later, the Academy was finished as a venue for opera and other upper-class entertainments. Tony Pastor was not finished. Rival houses opened on the Rialto, along with more theaters, but the great attraction was Tony Pastor’s, where he introduced such stars as Lillian Russell, Weber & Fields, and George M. Cohan. His presence even helped keep the raunchier competition away from the Rialto. Most of the newer low-life shows set up for business to the north and west, from Twenty-sixth Street to Forty-second Street, west of Sixth Avenue. The district became k
nown as the Tenderloin. Pastor made no moralizing speeches. He just presented the best entertainment he could find and went on living his life. By all accounts, he was a generous man who did not forget where he came from. He stayed in business until 1908, when he closed the theater and retired. He died the same year, leaving only about $45,000 in the bank. His friends explained that over the years of his great success, he had given away more than a million dollars. Not all New Yorkers, then or now, do it only for the money.

  Across the street from Pastor’s, a new restaurant opened in 1882, and among the investors was William Steinway, who presided over Steinway Hall. The restaurant was called Luchow’s. The food was German, and there were “oompah” bands playing each night and waiters moving around in lederhosen. The musicians and performers from Pastor’s often came through its doors after their last show. So did other performers, actors, and songwriters (the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers—ASCAP—was founded there by an Irish immigrant named Victor Herbert in 1913 to protect the copyrights of those who made the music). Stars came too, including the upscale performers from Steinway Hall such as Paderewski and Caruso. Across the coming years, others would be seen there: Cole Porter, Leonard Bernstein, Larry Hart. You might even see H. L. Mencken dining with Theodore Dreiser, the two of them discussing literature or politics over Wiener schnitzel.

  When I was getting to know Fourteenth Street in the late 1950s, the street was a mess of cheap shoe and clothing stores. The old Academy of Music had been hammered into dust in 1926 to make way for the massive headquarters of Con Edison. Its once-powerful neighbor, Tammany Hall, had vanished too, taking the remains of Tony Pastor’s stage with it. In 1929, the politicians opened their new headquarters on Union Square and East Seventeenth Street, where this last Tammany Hall would remain until 1943 (it’s now a small, elegant Off-Broadway theater and the location of the New York Film School). In the 1950s, almost everything of the Rialto was gone, with the immense exception of Luchow’s. In those days, I could never afford to eat in the place, bringing my custom across the street to the Automat. I did pass it four or five days a week on my way to the Gramercy Gym, a few doors down, where I hung out with the professional fighters, including my friend Jose Torres, who was on his way to becoming the light-heavyweight champion of the world. The great trainer Cus D’Amato ran the gym and was often on the premises, pointing out to me the great lessons for boxers to be learned from the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant. “Read this part,” he said one afternoon in the small office where he sometimes spent the night. “Read how Grant understands that the other guy is just as afraid as you are, and so the only way to make him more afraid, the way to win, is to attack!”

  One autumn evening, as I was leaving the Gramercy, a bit of the ancient, mindless glamour of the lost Rialto made an appearance. A black limousine pulled up at Luchow’s, the heavy, glistening doors opened, and there by herself, so white-blond she could hurt your eyes, was Zsa Zsa Gabor. I laughed out loud, for Zsa Zsa was one of the great symbols of unearned celebrity, more famous for her many rich boyfriends than for her performances. But I stood there anyway, along with about a dozen other people, and watched her arrival. She looked exactly like the woman she had played in John Huston’s 1952 film Moulin Rouge, with the creamy skin and the too-perfect nose and the rustling silken clothes. She smiled, bowed to show a bit of cleavage, blew us kisses, said, “Good evening, darlings,” and went in. I hoped that Henri Toulouse-Lautrec was waiting at a good table.

  As the years passed, nobody except derelicts sat at the stone tables in Union Square. It declined swiftly, as had its counterparts south of Fourteenth Street. The pattern was now familiar. Degradation always preceded menace, and Union Square was for many years a scary place. And then in the 1990s, it too changed. Landscapers and policemen did their jobs. The junkies went somewhere else. So did the knife artists and the peddlers of handguns. A green market opened and was a major success. Barnes & Noble opened its flagship store. Excellent restaurants opened on the edge of the square and on its side streets. Once more, the square was a “ventilator,” a good green place where New Yorkers could loll in the sun or read on benches or order ice-cream cones. It belonged to all of us again, and on September 12, 2001, it was there when we needed it.

  Chapter Nine

  Some Villages

  THE CENTER OF my old Manhattan neighborhood was Second Avenue and Ninth Street. In 1958, after one year in Mexico and another in Brooklyn going to art school, both on the GI Bill, I felt it was time to try living, as we said, “over New York.”

  The agent for the move was an ex-marine named Barney Leggett, who had a day job on Wall Street and, to make a few extra dollars, served as the superintendent of three buildings around what would become the center of a new life. With two friends from Brooklyn, I moved into the third floor right at 307 East Ninth Street. The rent was fifty-four dollars a month. Sometimes I still wake up in the dark, thinking I’m there.

  The railroad flat had the classic tenement design: a kitchen, two doorless bedrooms, a living room, and a bathroom. I was working then as a commercial artist and designer, and set up my drawing table against a window in the kitchen, with a view of the weed trees in the backyard. Sometimes I worked all night, with the radio pitched low to Symphony Sid on WEVD, the only radio station in America named for a socialist (Eugene V. Debs). With three of us in the flat, someone had to take the couch in the living room. It didn’t matter. We were having more laughs than any human beings deserved.

  There was, of course, much drinking. In the 1950s, there was a lot of drinking all over New York, a leftover from the days of Prohibition and the celebrations of the end of the war. It was a time of big parties, bathtubs full of canned beer and ice, as many young women as we could lure to the flat, dancing to Ray Charles, Sinatra, the Penguins, and the Orquesta Aragon. There were also too many cigarettes, dirty glasses, spilled drinks, and some fistfights and visits from the cops. Some of the hangovers were moral.

  But the five years I spent in that neighborhood were full of excitement. To begin with, I was living, at last, in Oz, and not just passing through.

  Like most human beings, we explored this new fraction of the world in expanding concentric circles. The northern border of our little village was Fourteenth Street, only five blocks away, but the main drag was Second Avenue. From about 1880, this had been the center of what became known as the Jewish Rialto, where Yiddish variations of the Fourteenth Street formulas were staged for Jewish immigrant audiences. But its great days were long over, for a variety of reasons, but primarily because of the erosion of the Yiddish language. The Holocaust had cut savagely into the flow of Yiddish-speaking immigrants from Europe, since the dead cannot leave for a new world. Increasingly, the Yiddish speakers were old, and eventually there would be more readers of the Jewish Daily Forward—the robust and beloved Forvetz—in Miami than in New York. In the 1920s, it sold 250,000 copies a day. Today, it’s a weekly, with a circulation of about 15,000, published almost entirely in English.

  But along Second Avenue there were still traces of what had passed. You’d see a “delicatessen store” here (where you ordered a “glass tea” with the goodies) and the Gem Spa there (offering the finest egg creams in Manhattan). There too was Ratner’s, the dairy restaurant near East Sixth Street where so many learned to love cheese blintzes, latkes, and kreplachs, in spite of the calculated rudeness of the waiters. And down toward Houston Street, there was Moskowitz and Lupowitz, with a menu more varied than Ratner’s, better-mannered waiters, and higher prices. There were Yiddish newspapers on the newsstands, and on weekends, you would see cars from the United Jewish Appeal roaming the side streets, its young drivers and passengers visiting old people who had been left behind by children and grandchildren, and lived in tenements that had imperfect heat or too many flights of stairs. Most of them were women, and when I spent a day following the young volunteers around, the old women turned out to be widows, at once cranky and grateful.

 
When I walk those streets today, I often think of those women, and how they held on so long to their small pieces of New York. Old photographs of the Lower East Side show how that world once looked, but those solitary old women added another level of resonance. They are like characters in the final chapters in a long elegiac novel. The early American chapters can be seen in photographs of the immigrants arriving in the port of New York. From the far side of the ship’s railing, we can see that most of them were small. Their faces were still, the eyes wary. Ahead of them was America. Behind them were all those heart-chilling experiences that had urged them into exile: pogroms after the assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881; the permanent, sleep-killing possibility of sudden violence; more anti-Semitic violence after 1905. Behind them were the packing of goods at midnight, the movement along frozen roads heading west, the confusions at the piers of Hamburg, then the long voyage across the Atlantic.

  Ahead lay life in many of the streets where I roamed in the late 1950s. A century earlier, some Jews took up residence for a while in the Five Points. Most wandered into Kleindeutschland, on the East River side of the Bowery, where many people understood Yiddish. The emigration from Russia, Poland, and Eastern Europe did not abate. Between 1881 and 1914, two million Jews left Europe and sailed into New York. By 1905, most of the Germans were gone, seeking the consolation of distance after the General Slocum disaster, when more than a thousand German children died in the sinking of that excursion ship in the East River. They moved uptown, to Yorkville and other places. The entire area from the Bowery to the East River, from Houston Street to the Brooklyn Bridge, was then called the Lower East Side, and it was overwhelmingly Jewish and poor. For some of those abandoned old women, it was the only America they ever knew.